A crowd had gathered at the Ojai Meadows Preserve early Saturday morning. The nearby mountains were still shrouded in mist, and the cool, gray quiet was interrupted only by the sound of birds.
Then a throaty quivering of flute emerged from behind the audience — and a stab of clarinet from another spot, a distant burr of saxophone, pips from a second flute. An almost avian quartet gradually coalesced from specks of song and chatter among the instruments, in conversation with the animals in the trees. This was Susie Ibarra’s “Sunbird.”
That a couple of hundred people showed up at 8 a.m. for an experimental performance in the middle of a field speaks volumes about the Ojai Music Festival. Since the 1940s, this annual event, nestled in an idyllic valley in Southern California, has catered to audiences eager to be challenged.
Each year, a different music director is invited to guide the programming. For this installment, which took place Thursday through Sunday, morning to night, the festival looked to the flutist Claire Chase, one of the most important nodes of creation and collaboration in contemporary music.
Chase, a founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the instigator of “Density 2036,” an ongoing 24-year commissioning project to create a new repertoire for her instrument, has an aesthetic well matched to Ojai. Her approach is rigorous yet relaxed, with an improvisatory, cooperative, nature-loving, even hippie bent — meditative, sunny and smiling, encouraging open minds and open ears. Two dozen musicians performed in shifting combinations throughout the weekend, so you had the feeling of being dropped in the middle of a joyfully bustling commune.
About 40 works were played over the course of the festival. Here are a few that stood out.
‘Sky Islands’
Ibarra’s “Sky Islands” won the Pulitzer Prize in music last month, but Chase, one of the best-connected and most curious figures in the field, had programmed it for the festival well before that.
Like many of the pieces at Ojai this year, “Sky Islands” was an unpredictable, amorphous, kaleidoscopic soundscape, its structure intentionally loose and good-natured. The effect was of a series of lovely moments: a dialogue among tall sticks of bamboo struck against the ground; the cheerful clangor of gongs traditional to the Philippines; the appealingly moist sound of amplified tapping against the leaves of a plant. As one of two percussionists in the small ensemble, Ibarra was calmly commanding — as she was throughout the weekend, in music by both her and others.
With a flexible score and with improvisation an integral part of its realization, “Sky Islands” was of a piece with much of the music Chase programmed. The branch of contemporary composition that was largely on offer is aligned with jazz and John Cage-style, Zen-influenced conceptualism. Consider the two-sentence score of Pauline Oliveros’s “Horse Sings From Cloud,” performed in the meadow on Saturday morning: “Sustain one or more tones or sounds until any desire to change the tone(s) or sound(s) subsides. When there is no desire to change the tone(s) or sound(s) then change.”
‘bayou-borne’
Annea Lockwood, born in 1939, was one of the veteran composers who were touchstones of Chase’s festival. Lockwood, a grinning presence in the audience all weekend, paid tribute to Oliveros’s Texas upbringing with “bayou-borne,” in which nine players improvised with a map of Houston’s natural waterways as their score, taking the meandering curves, dilations and contractions of rivers and tributaries as inspiration for the music-making.
Skittish quiet — Ibarra waving her brushes in the air; a trumpeter mewing from a nearby tennis court like a somber animal; delicate, wandering clarinet lines — built suddenly to ringing noise, like a creek swelling into rapids.
‘How Forests Think’
Wu Wei is a master of the sheng, the traditional Chinese reed instrument whose plangently wheezing sound is a little like that of an accordion or tiny organ. His playing was a highlight of the weekend, whether in Ibarra’s “Nest Box” or Liza Lim’s “How Forests Think,” in which he also recited Chinese poetry and had passages of Tibetan throat singing.
Lim creatively combines unlikely instruments, as in the eerie, darkly bronzed rightness of a mixture of sheng and saxophone. The four movements of “How Forests Think” culminate in “The Trees,” as spare and flickering as the light dappling a jungle’s floor. At the end, a doleful English horn line gives way to rustles through the ensemble, like a gentle cacophony of dry leaves.
‘Pan’
The most magnetic performer of the weekend, unsurprisingly, was Chase herself. Few musicians seize a stage with her energy, whipping her flutes around with pied piper charisma, and “Density 2036” has been producing a slew of works tailor-made to her talents since she got it started in 2013. The Chase-iest “Density” piece of all may well be Marcos Balter’s “Pan,” in which she raced around the stage enacting the story of the roguish, pipes-playing god, trailed by an intergenerational horde of followers drawn from the town of Ojai.
“Pan” was performed at the Libbey Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater in a downtown park. While the festival now sprawls across a range of venues, the bowl remains its heart and soul — open to the air, as well as to the sounds of birds, frogs, church bells, sirens. Any music feels fresh in this space, and “Pan” was a living ritual: funny, poignant, mysterious.
‘Pulsefield 3’
Chase’s style of making music, so proudly focused on building a community onstage, is risky: The players sometimes give the sense that they’re performing for one another more than for the audience, and you end up feeling like you’re watching a fun house party from outside.
But during the premiere of Terry Riley’s “Pulsefield 3,” which closed the festival, the exhilaration conjured among the ensemble flooded over the crowd, too. The piece is not much more than a simple, hopeful riff — repeated and developed and, in this iteration of the wide-open score, initially just played and eventually also sung.
The fact that most of the musicians singing it were far from professional vocalists was the point. As he has since the 1960s, Riley, who turns 90 on June 24, created a space in which virtuosity could meet amateurism and the everyday could become sublime. Like Ojai itself, it was a little woo-woo — and utterly irresistible.
Videos by Walter Park/Gropious Productions
